Boys' Deaths Strike a Chinese Nerve

BEIJING—The discovery last week of the bodies of five children in a trash bin has rattled China's online community, highlighting anger over the country's wealth gap.

State-run Xinhua news agency on Tuesday said it had confirmed the identities of five boys, from nine to 13 years old, who it described as street children and who were found dead Friday inside a garbage container in the town of Bijie in southwestern Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces. The boys, all surnamed Tao, likely died of carbon-monoxide poisoning after lighting a fire inside the bin and climbing inside to take shelter from the cold, state media said, citing local police.

The death of five boys has started an online frenzy of criticism from China's Internet users. The WSJ's Josh Chin talks about the unspoken topic of China's growing poor and why it's a black mark for socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Their deaths struck a particular chord, not just because it came on the heels of a meeting in Beijing picking a new Communist Party leadership but because of the echoes of a tale many Chinese associate with the horrors of capitalism,
Hans Christian Andersen's
"The Little Match Girl." The story, about a poor Danish girl who dies from exposure on New Year's Eve trying to sell matches on the street, was once included in Chinese primary school text books.

According to Xinhua, the boys were the sons of three brothers, two of whom had left home to work as garbage collectors in the coastal city of Shenzhen. The remaining brother, Tao Jinyou, described a situation of little adult oversight for the boys and said four of the five had dropped out of school.

"Sometimes they didn't even come home at night," Xinhua quoted him as saying.

Mr. Tao told Xinhua the boys had gone out to play three weeks earlier and never came back. Local authorities have launched an investigation in the deaths and suspended or dismissed six officials pending the results of the investigation, Xinhua said.

Bijie, where the children lived, is a coal-rich but poverty-stricken city with a reputation for corruption that has sent a steady stream of petitioners to Beijing in recent years. A number of the city's residents have left to work in other places, leaving children in the care of grandparents or relatives.

The news of the boys' deaths has consumed Chinese Internet users, hovering near the top of the trending topics list on
Sina
Corp.'s
popular Weibo microblogging service and leading Chinese search engine
Baidu
Inc.
's list of most-searched stories.

Stories of suffering children have particular impact in China amid the one-child policy and a strong belief in the family as the most basic unit of society. In this case, the impact appears to have been amplified by Chinese familiarity with "The Little Match Girl." "I thought the little match girl was something that only happened in capitalist societies," said one Sina Weibo microblogger. "Why this sense of superiority about our system?"

News of the children's deaths comes on the heels of the 18th Party Congress, which was characterized by speeches and state-run media editorials extolling the virtues of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," code for the country's state-dominated approach to capitalism. "Thanks to over 90 years of hard struggle, our party has rallied and led the people of all ethnic groups in turning the poor and backward old China into an increasingly prosperous and powerful new China," departing party chief Hu Jintao noted in the opening to a speech widely praised by the official media.

Some social-media users highlighted the contrast between that language and the incident in Guizhou. "At a time when we're crowing about the rise of the nation and the creation of a moderately well-off society, to have five children die while seeking warmth in a trash bin is truly bizarre," said
Cao Lin,
a columnist for the state-run China Youth Daily, on his microblog.

The nation's wealth gap ranks near the top of a long list of problems facing China's next generation of leaders, led by newly appointed Communist Party chief Xi Jinping. When China first began economic reforms in 1978, the vast majority of Chinese families were on roughly equal financial footing. Now the top 10% of Chinese families control 56% of income, according to a recent survey by Texas A&M University professor
Gan Li,
a figure that makes China more unequal than some African countries. Last week, Mr. Xi won applause online for an inaugural speech that said the party needed to do more to improve people's livelihoods.

Not all Internet users felt the government was to blame for the deaths. Some concentrated on the children's families instead, questioning why their parents didn't do more to keep them safe. The parents couldn't be reached for comment.

Still, much of the public anger over the deaths was directed at the government. "In an environment where leaders are the first to escape when things go bad, who's going to consider the poor, the homeless, the orphans?" one microblogger asked in a post that was later deleted.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.